The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland | Page 8

the _Colloquy of the Ancients_ (SILVA GADELICA). Here Finn and his companions are explicitly pronounced to be saved by their natural virtues, and the relations of the Church and the Fenian warriors are most friendly.
Independent of these three cycles, but often touching them here and there, and borrowing from them, there are a number of miscellaneous tales which range from the earliest times till the coming of the Danes. The most celebrated of these are the Storming of the Hostel with the death of Conary the High King of Ireland, and the story of the Boru tribute. Two examples of these miscellaneous tales of a high antiquity are contained in this book--King Iubdan and King Fergus and Etain and Midir. Both of them have great charm and?delightfulness.
Finally, the manner in which these tales grew into form must be remembered when we read them. At first, they were not written down, but recited in hall and with a harp's accompaniment by the various bardic story-tellers who were attached to the court of the chieftain, or wandered singing and reciting from court to court. Each bard, if he was a creator, filled up the original framework of the tale with ornaments of his own, or added new events or personages to the tale, or mixed it up with other related tales, or made new tales altogether attached to the main personages of the original tale--episodes in their lives into which the bardic fancy wandered. If these new forms of the tales or episodes were imaginatively true to the characters round which they were conceived and to the atmosphere of the time, they were taken up by other bards and became often separate tales, or if a great number attached themselves to one hero, they finally formed themselves into one heroic story, such as that which is gathered round Cuchulain, which, as it stands, is only narrative, but might in time have become epical. Indeed, the Tàin approaches, though at some distance, an epic. In this way that mingling of elements out of the three cycles into a single Saga took place.
Then when Christianity came, the Irish who always, Christians or not, loved their race and its stories, would not let them go. They took them and suffused them with a Christian tenderness, even a Christian forgiveness. Or they inserted Christian endings, while they left the rest of the stories as pagan as before. Later on, while the stories were still learned by the bards and recited, they were written down, and somewhat spoiled by a luxurious use of ornamental adjectives, and by the weak, roving and uninventive fancy of men and monks aspiring to literature but incapable of reaching it.
However, in spite of all this intermingling and of the different forms of the same story, it is possible for an intelligent and sensitive criticism, well informed in comparative mythology and folklore, to isolate what is very old in these tales from that which is less old, and that in turn from that which is still less old, and that from what is partly historical, medieval or modern. This has been done, with endless controversy, by those excellent German, French, and Irish scholars who have, with a thirsty pleasure, recreated the ancient literature of Ireland, and given her once more a literary name among the nations--a name which, having risen again, will not lose but increase its brightness.

As to the stories themselves, they have certain well-marked characteristics, and in dwelling on these, I shall chiefly refer, for illustration, to the stories in this book. Some of these?characteristic elements belong to almost all mythological tales, and arise from human imagination, in separated lands, working in the same or in a similar way on the doings of Nature, and impersonating them. The form, however, in which these original ideas are cast is, in each people, modified and varied by the animal life, the climate, the configuration of the country, the nearness of mountain ranges and of the sea, the existence of wide forests or vast plains, of swift rivers and great inland waters.
The earliest tales of Ireland are crowded with the sea that wrapt the island in its arms; and on the west and north the sea was the mighty and mysterious Ocean, in whose far infinities lay for the Irish the land of Immortal Youth. Between its shining shores and Ireland, strange islands--dwelt in by dreadful or by fair and gracious creatures, whose wonders Maeldun and Brendan visited--lay like jewels on the green and sapphire waters. Out of this vast ocean emerged also their fiercest enemies. Thither, beyond these islands into the Unknown, over the waves on a fairy steed, went Oisín with Niam; thither, in after years, sailed St Brendan, till it seemed he touched America. In the ocean depths were fair cities